Focusing on Scrap

Chris Jordan’s massive photographs of scrap materials reveal both our excessive consumerism and the critical need for recycling.

By Chris Munford

A great wall of baled plastic bottles, an ocean of discarded cell phones, a mountain of crushed auto bodies—these are common sights to those in the recycling industry. Rarer is the sight of people crowding into a trendy big-city art gallery on opening night to see photographs of such scenes.
   That’s exactly what happened at the Yossi Milo Gallery on West 25th Street in Manhattan’s Chelsea district one balmy evening in early September. As dusk descended over the Hudson River two blocks away and as art aficionados perused the latest paintings and sculptures in neighboring galleries, viewers at Yossi Milo were treated to a series of huge photographs depicting sights normally seen only in recycling centers and salvage yards. The unusual event was the opening of a selection of works by noted Seattle photographer Chris Jordan.
   His images command attention immediately because of their sheer size. They are enormous, ranging from 4 to 8 feet in width and as much as 5 feet in height. Yossi Milo is not a particularly small place, but it took only eight of Jordan’s photographs to fill the entire gallery. They literally pull the viewer into the subject. Yet, despite their size, the images are, up close, incredibly detailed and intricate.
   A theme running through Jordan’s work is an emphasis on size and quantity. The subject typically fills the entire field of the photograph. Whether recycled steel, glass, electronic components, or PET containers are the subject, the sheer quantity of the material depicted in the photographs is arresting to the casual viewer unfamiliar with such scenes. When the unusual size of the photographs is factored in, the effect can be truly startling.
   In one 2-by-7-foot panorama, crushed auto bodies are shown stacked on a barge en route to a West Coast shredding operation. In reality, the stack is four stories high and roughly 150 feet in length. In the photo, the auto bodies occupy the entire frame, from top to bottom and end to end. Seen from several feet away, the colors of the cars seem to flow into one another. Up close, the individual makes and models of the crushed vehicles are clearly discernible. This photograph was chosen as a center foldout in the gallery show catalog, and the resulting panorama spans three pages. The detail, even in a much-scaled-down copy of the original work, is remarkable.
   In another 4-by-5-foot photograph, circuitboards from dismantled computers form a mosaic pattern that at first glance appears to be some kind of aerial cityscape. In another photograph of similar size, an enormous jumble of different-colored glass containers appears to flow endlessly from an unseen source beyond the bounds of the photograph.
   “Most people don’t really have any idea what happens to things when they throw them away,” Jordan says. “The amount of stuff we discard is enormous. I wanted to show the scope of this—to make a comment about consumerism.” Then he adds, “Recycling is one obvious solution.”
   Standing in front of a 4-by-8-foot photograph in which thousands of discarded cell phones seem to cascade from top to bottom and from edge to edge, Jordan tries to explain what he is after when he readies his camera for a shot.
   “Every year we throw away about 130 million cell phones. There are about 3,000 cell phones in this photograph. It would take 43,000 of these to show the true number of phones discarded,” he says. “Side by side, those photographs would stretch more than 60 miles. And that’s just in one year.”
   Jordan admits that he is both awed and fascinated by his subject matter. While he is troubled by the enormous volumes of material our society discards, he finds a certain macabre beauty in such scenes and considers his work to be a kind of cultural self-reflection. His contrasting feelings about his subject matter are summed up in the title chosen for the gallery show: “Intolerable Beauty—Portraits of American Mass Consumption.”
   Jordan’s work has progressed in two distinct phases. In the early phase, he photographed recyclables or discarded materials just as he found them—stacked neatly in a processing yard or warehouse or thrown haphazardly in a pile. =His subjects were usually found outdoors, where he was limited by such factors as weather and available light.
   “I used to sneak into some of these locations, carrying this huge camera and tripod, and try to get some photographs before anyone realized I was there. I got caught sometimes,” Jordan says, ruefully. “Then I started asking for permission to come on-site. I found a lot of recyclers very cooperative. Some of them would let me arrange or group the objects the way I wanted to.”
   Indeed, in his more recent phase, Jordan has worked indoors more often and has taken a hand in shaping or manipulating the subject matter. In this phase, electronics scrap has become one of his favorite subjects, figuring prominently in the Manhattan gallery show. His cell phone photograph, for example, dates from this period. Jordan took that image at a recycling center in Orlando in 2004. He first arranged more than 3,000 phones on a warehouse floor then mounted a ladder to obtain the shot
he wanted.
   Jordan prints the photographs in his studio using an Epson UltraChrome pigmented inkjet process. He spent six months researching film-scanning techniques before settling on a method. The finished pieces are then mounted on plexiglass and framed. Notably, he makes just nine prints of each image.
   Jordan’s main artistic tool is a Japanese large-format view camera that uses film measuring 8 by 10 inches—roughly 800 to 1,000 percent larger than standard 35 mm film. Not surprisingly, this film requires special apparatus to be processed and printed. The camera is so large that a tripod is not an option, it’s a necessity. Because such cameras are not commonly used, equipment and parts for them are unusually expensive.
   “Each lens for this camera costs more than my Mazda Miata,” Jordan says—and he’s not joking.
   Money has at times been very much on his mind. Jordan quit a 10-year career as a corporate lawyer in 2002 to pursue his photography full-time. He was so intent on making his new career work that he took the additional step of resigning from the bar so he would not be tempted to return to his previous career. That said, many of Jordan’s photographs now sell for several thousand dollars each, proving in a novel manner what recyclers already know: There’s money in scrap.
   There’s also no denying that Jordan’s photographs depict a disturbing picture of excess, which in turn produces enormous streams of end-of-life materials. In general, his work underscores the need for and the ongoing task of recycling much of this material, but not all of his images show recyclables. One 5-by-8-foot work, for instance, depicts thousands and thousands of cigarette butts, driving home the point that not everything generated by our consumerism is recycled.
   Whether they depict scrap or waste, Jordan’s photographs and their subject matter command attention, and interest in his work is growing. The attorney-turned-photographer has had solo exhibitions at galleries as far flung as Los Angeles, Ireland, and Italy. In the end, Jordan makes a strong statement about consumerism while also effectively driving home the critical need for recycling. 

Chris Munford is a writer based in New Jersey. He formerly held editing positions with American Metal Market, Platt’s Metals Week, and Metal Bulletin.

Publisher’s Note: Chris Jordan can be reached at 206/706-1550 or cj@chrisjordan.com. 
To view more of his photographs, visit www.chrisjordan.com.